But now he allows himself to antic.i.p.ate the sight that awaits him, past the last rhomboid: the

bridge's mad maw, the gateway to dream and memory, where sellers of fish spread their wares on beds of dirty ice. A perpetual bustle, a coming and going, that he honors as the city's very pulse.

And steps out, into unexpected light, faux-neon redline glare above a smooth sweep of Singaporean plastic. -

Memory is violated.

Someone brushes past him, too close, unseeing, and very nearly dies, the magnets letting go with that faint click that he feels more than hears. But he does not draw the blade fully, and the drunk staggers on, oblivious.

He reseats the hilt and stares bleakly at this latest imposition:

LUCKY DRAGON swirling in bland script up a sort of fin or pylon whose base seems comprised of dozens of crawling video screens.

19.

5. MARIACHI STATIC.

'so she left you for this TV producer," the country singer said, slipping what was left of thirteen ounces of vodka back into the waistband of his indigo jeans, so new and taut that they creaked when he walked. The flat bottle's concavity rode there behind an antique buckle that resembled an engraved commemorative plaque, something someone had once won, Rydell supposed, for calf-roping or some similar compet.i.tive activity. Rydell powered the side window down, a crack, to let the fumes out.

"Production coordinator," Rydell said, wishing the vodka would put his pa.s.senger, whose name was Buell Creedmore, to sleep again. The man had spent the better part of their drive up the coast asleep, snoring lightly, and Rydell hadn't minded that. Creedmore was a friend, or maybe more of an acquaintance, of Durius Walker's. Durius had been a drug dealer before, in South Central, and had gotten addicted to the stuff. Now that he'd gotten his recovery, he spent a lot of time with other people who had drug problems, trying to help them. Rydell a.s.sumed Buell Creedmore was one of those, though as far he could see the man was just basically a drunk.

"Bet that one burned your a.s.s," Creedmore said, his eyes slit with spirits. He was a small man, lightly built, but roped with the sort of whipcord muscle that had never seen the inside of a gym.

Ditchdigger muscle. What Rydell took to be several layers of artificial tan were wearing off over an inherent pallor. Bleached hair with dark roots was slicked straight back with some product that kept it looking like he'd just stepped out of a shower. He hadn't, though, and he was sweating in spite of the air-conditioning.

"Well," Rydell said, "I figured it's her call."

"What kind of bleeding-a.s.s liberal bulls.h.i.t is that?" Creedmore asked. He pulled the bottle from his waistband and eyed the remaining liquor narrowly, as though he were a carpenter checking a level. It seemed to fail to meet his standards just then, so he returned it to its

20.

place behind the commemorative plaque. "What kind of man are you, anyway?"

Rydell briefly entertained the idea of pulling over on the margin,

beating Creedmore senseless, then leaving him there at the side of the five, to get up to San Francisco as best he could. But he didn't and, in fact, said nothing.

"p.u.s.s.y-a.s.sed att.i.tude like that, that's what's wrong with America today."

Rydell thought about illegal choke holds, brief judicious constriction of the carotid artery.

Maybe Creedmore wouldn't even remember if Rydell put one on him. But it wouldn't keep him under, not that long anyway, and they'd taught Rydell in Knoxville that you couldn't count on how a drunk would react to anything.

"Hey, Buell," Rydell asked, "whose car is this anyway?"

Creedmore fell silent. Grew, Rydell felt, restive.

Rydell had wondered from the start if the car might not be stolen. He hadn't wanted to think about it really, because he needed the ride up to NoCal. A plane ticket would've had to come out of his severance from the Lucky Dragon store, and he had to be extra careful with that until he determined whether or not there was anything to this story of '~mazaki's, that there was money for him to earn, up in San Francisco.

Yamazaki was deep, Rydell told himself. He'd never actually figured out what it was that Yamazaki did. Sort of a freelance j.a.panese anthropologist who studied Americans, as near as Rydell could tell. Maybe the j.a.panese equivalent of the Americans Lucky Dragon hired to tell them they needed a curb check. Good man, Yamazaki, but not easy to say where he was coming from. The last time he'd heard from Yamazaki, he'd wanted Rydell to find him a netrunner, and Rydell had sent him this guy named Laney, a quant.i.tative researcher who'd just quit Slitscan, and had been moping around the Chateau, running up a big bill. Laney had taken the job, had gone over to Tokyo, and Rydell had subsequently gotten fired for, they called it, fraternizing with the guests. That was basically how Rydell had wound up working night security in a nience store, because he'd tried to help Yamazaki.

21.

Now he was driving this Hawker-Aichi roadster up the Five, very definitely the designated driver, no idea what was waiting for him up there, and halfway wondering if he weren't about to transport a stolen vehicle across a state line. And all because Yamazaki said that that same Laney, over in Tokyo, wanted to hire him to do some fieldwork. That was what Yamazaki called it, "fieldwork."

And that, after he'd talked with Durius, had been enough for Rydell.

The Lucky Dragon had been starting to get old for Rydell. He hadn't ever gotten along with Mr.

Park too well, and when he'd take his break, out back, after the curb check every morning, he'd started to feel really down. The patch of ground the Lucky Dragon had been set down on was sort of scooped out of the foot of the hillside there, and at some point the exposed, nearly vertical cut had been quake-proofed with some kind of weird, gray, rubbery polymer, a perpetual semi-liquid that knit the soil behind it together and trapped whatever was thrown or pressed against it in a grip like summer tar. The polymer was studded with hubcaps, because the place had been a car lot once. Hubcaps and bottles and more nameless junk. In the funk that had started to come over him, out back there on his breaks, he'd collect a handful of rocks and stand there, throwing them, as hard as he could, into the polymer. They didn't make much of a noise when they hit, and in fact they vanished entirely. Just ripped straight into it and then it sealed over behind them, like nothing had happened. And Rydell had started to see that as emblematic of broader things, how he was like those rocks, in his pa.s.sage through the world, and how the polymer was like life, sealing over behind him, never leaving any trace at all that he'd been there.

And when Durius would come back to take his own break and tell Rydell it was time to get back out front, sometimes he'd find Rydell that way, throwing those rocks.

"Hit you a hubcap, man," Durius would advise, "break you a bottle."

But Rydell hadn't wanted to.

And when Rydel! had told Durius about Yamazaki and Laney and some money, maybe, to be made up in San Francisco, Durius had listened carefully, asking a few questions, then advised Rydell to go for it.

22.

"What about job security?" Rydell had asked. "Job security? Doing this s.h.i.t? Are you crazy?"

"Benefits," Rydell countered.

"You tried to actually use the medical coverage they give you here?

Gotta go to Tiajuana to get it."

"Vell," Rydell had said, "I don't like to just quit."

"That's 'cause you got fired from every last job you ever had," Durius had explained. "I seen your resume."

So Rydell had given Mr. Park written notice, and Mr. Park had promptly fired him, citing numerous violations of Lucky Dragon policy on Rydell's part, up to and including offering medical aid to the victim of a one-car collision on Sunset, an act which Mr. Park insisted could have involved Lucky Dragon's parent corporation in costly insurance litigation.

"But she walked in here under her own power," Rydell had protested. "All I did was offer her a bottle of iced tea and call the traffic cops."

"Smart lawyer claim ice tea put her in systemic shock."

"Shock my b.u.t.t."

But Mr. Park had known that if he fired Rydell, the last. paycheck would be smaller than if Rydell quit.

PraiseG.o.d, who could get all emotional if someone was leaving, had cried and given him a big hug, and then, as he'd left the store, she'd slipped him a pair of Brazilian GPS sungla.s.ses, with inbuilt phone and AM-FM radio, about the most expensive item Lucky Dragon carried. Rydell hadn't wanted to take them, because he knew they'd turn up missing on the next inventory.

"f.u.c.k the inventory," PraiseG.o.d had said.

Back in his room over Mrs. Siekevitz's garage, six blocks away and just below Sunset, Rydell had stretched out on his narrow bed and tried to get the radio in the gla.s.ses to work. All he'd been able to get, though, was static, faintly inflected with what might have been mariachi music.